Mark Furman, the key prosecution witness in the case of American football player and actor O. J. Simpson, accused of murdering his ex-wife and her lover, has died in the United States.
According to the Associated Press, Furman died on May 12 at the age of 76. The cause of death was not specified.
In 1994, Simpson was accused of the brutal murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her lover Ronald Goldman. It was Furman, then a detective with the Los Angeles police, who discovered a bloody glove in Simpson's home. He was called to testify.
The defense of the athlete, dubbed by the American media “The Dream Team“ (a strategy developed by Johnny Cochran and Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian's father), convinced the jury of Simpson's innocence.
The glove that Furman found did not end up on Simpson during the trial, and the defense accused Furman of racism (Simpson is African-American, and the victims were a white woman and a white man), presenting a recording in which the officer brags about his brutal treatment of black people. As a result, the defense argued that Furman had committed perjury and was not a credible witness.
Furman retired from the Los Angeles Police Department in 1995. Less than a year later, facing perjury charges, Furman pleaded guilty. His police career was over. He tried his hand at writing and television commentary, but later moved to Idaho and built a farm there.
A subsequent civil trial, two years after his acquittal in the criminal trial, found Simpson guilty of the deaths of his wife and Goldman, and the court ordered him to pay a fine of $33.5 million. The athlete died in 2024 at the age of 76.